The Jewish magazine Tablet ran an
article Monday titled, “The Specifically Jewy
Perviness of Harvey Weinstein.”
Author Mark Oppenheimer said
Weinstein is “a character straight out of Philip Roth, playing out his revenge
fantasies on the Goyim.”
From Tablet
Magazine:
At first squint, Harvey Weinstein seems like a very familiar type. Isn’t
he the old, same old, another rich, entitled, powerful man with a bad dye job
abusing his might to coerce women into sex? Isn’t Harvey just like Roger Ailes,
or Bill O’Reilly, or, for that matter, Bill Clinton? But look at the details of
the case and you’ll see that the answer is no. Harvey is different. Harvey,
sadly, is a deeply Jewish kind of pervert.
Better than perhaps any other author, Roth captured the particular
anxiety of the Jewish American man in the twentieth century, finally coming
into power but, having not grown up with it, unsure of what he’s supposed to do
now. All those years craving unattainable Gentiles, but never before the means
to entice them. The result is Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint, a grown
man whose emotional and sexual life is still all one big performance piece,
just as it had been when he was a teenager and pleasured himself with a piece
of liver.
As a boy, Portnoy fantasized about attaining a mythical shiksa goddess
whom he nicknamed Thereal McCoy (get it?), who ice-skates “in her blue parka
and her red earmuffs and her big white mittens – Miss America, on blades! With
her mistletoe and her plum pudding (whatever that may be),” but as a grown-up
he graduates to the real woman he nicknames The Monkey. And what does he do to
abase her? He has her perform with an Italian whore. Yes, he eventually joins
in, but not before they enact a bad movie – not Hollywood, but San Fernando
Valley triple-X. And his nickname for her, The Monkey? That comes from an
episode in her life, from before Portnoy met her, when a couple swingers picked
her up and wanted her to eat a banana while she watched them copulate. For
having a past that gets him hot, she gets degraded with an animalistic
nickname. Her history as an actor is what he wants her for.
Harvey is cut from the same cloth. Growing up in Queens, he fantasized
of fame and fortune, and, once he got them, he struggled to maintain them by
building himself into a larger-than-life figure. He yelled at employees like he
was a studio boss from the 1920s – the only thing missing was a riding crop. He
ran Oscars campaigns like they used to in Old Hollywood. And he harassed women
not necessarily to use them as instruments of his pleasure, but to use them as
instruments of his power.
It goes without saying that nearly every one of these women – Rose
McGowan, Ambra Batillana, Laura Madden, Ashley Judd, etc. – was a Gentile, all
the better to feed Weinstein’s revenge-tinged fantasy of having risen above his
outer-borough, bridge-and-tunnel Semitic origins. But it turns out there was a
Jew(ess) in the bunch, none other than Lauren Sivan, of the potted-plant
episode. In that small way, he inadvertently broke out of the Portnoy mold,
performing his inadequacies not for the great all-American odeon but for a woman
who could be his cousin. Harvey can run from who he is, but he can’t hide.
Oppenheimer issued an apology for
the piece on Tuesday afternoon:
Yesterday I published a piece on
Harvey Weinstein that many found offensive. The analysis I offered was hasty
and ill-considered, especially in light of the even graver accusations that
were published by the New Yorker this morning. I take this as a lesson in the
importance of knowing as much as one can about a given story, and in taking the
time to think and feel things completely through before opining. I apologize
for not doing so in this case.
The
original piece is still up and is achieved here in case they
delete it.
No comments:
Post a Comment